


Starlight

by galpalaven



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Asexual Character, Asexual Relationship, Domestic, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, F/F, Fluff, Post-War, Shepard Cousins, super fluff, that is unacceptable i will fill this tag myself, uh i just noticed this relationship tag has 90 works in it??
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-06
Updated: 2017-07-06
Packaged: 2018-11-28 10:47:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11416314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galpalaven/pseuds/galpalaven
Summary: Tali and Shepard have a late night talk about love and timing and the universe and—and all that other mushy stuff.





	Starlight

Kira can’t sleep.

She isn’t sure what it is—something restless just beneath her ribcage, an itch that she can't scratch as she lies awake in her bed, staring up at the ceiling. Everything in the house is still new, from the ceiling to the blankets on the bed, the entire building having only just been finished very recently. Tali’s no longer emaciated from the weeks she spent stranded on the Normandy, and Kira’s not even the slightest bit sore anymore.Tali’s even taken to trying to stop wearing her suit so much, with the geth upgrades boosting her immune system so quickly. 

Maybe the restlessness is coming from her years adrift among the stars, she thinks. Growing up on space stations gave her a taste for a nomadic lifestyle, after all—made her used to never having solid ground beneath her feet. That was something she and Tali had in common, something they'd bonded over on the Normandy. 

Tali, however, is obviously adjusting much more easily to life on Rannoch than Kira, judging by how easily she fell asleep tonight, especially since Kira had had the brilliant idea to turn on a fan in the bedroom for white noise.

Kira turns her head to glance at her girlfriend then, where she lays on the other side of the bed, sighing softly as she takes in her sleeping face. Her freckles glow softly in the dark room, a gentle dusting of light across her forehead and cheeks that remind Kira of stars in the night sky—or, she guesses, out the window of an observation deck. Combined with the light purple of her skin, she reminds Kira a bit of a nebula come to life.

_Beautiful_. 

Lazily, Kira lifts her hand from where it’d been resting on her stomach, brushing the backs of her knuckles ever so gently across her girlfriend’s cheek, briefly marveling at the softness of her skin. She only lingers for a moment, careful not to wake her as she lets out a slow, quiet breath. She isn’t going to fall asleep any time soon, she can tell, so she decides to get up for a bit. Find something to distract her until she gets tired again, or to at least work out the restlessness in her limbs.

With a soft kiss to her girlfriend’s forehead, she carefully slides out of bed and pads out of the room, grabbing her robe from the hook on the wall as she goes. 

Once she’s up and out of the bedroom, she doesn’t really know where to go or what to do. She slows to a stop in the living room, hesitating, wondering what they had that could occupy her until she got tired. She could watch a vid, maybe, or pull a video game out and try to lose herself in something like that for a while. Her gaze drifts to the window after a minute—a wall of glass, overlooking the desert grass and the canyon just beyond. There’s a sliding glass door built into it, and after staring at it for another minute, Kira has an idea.

A walk. That’s what people who live planetside do when they want to clear their head or something, right?

With another quiet sigh, Kira crosses the room to the door, sliding on the shoes she keeps there, and steps out into the cool night air.

It’s surprisingly light out, as a breeze twists through the field of desert grass just beyond their little porch, the rustling whisper the only sound for miles with everyone else fast asleep. Watching the grass sway in the wind, she remembers distantly that, on top of adjusting to life on solid ground, she’s also suffering from a permanent case of jet lag, as the human nervous system is keyed to a 24 hour day. Rannoch’s day lasts 32 hours, almost 33. 

No wonder she can’t sleep.

Shaking her head, she turns her gaze to the sky, clear and bright with the light of a million, million stars— _I_ _t must be the new moon_ , she thinks as she steps down into the hip-high grass. It tickles her bare legs where her nightgown doesn’t quite cover her, but the grass is softer than she’d expected. She watches her hands as she walks for a moment, stretching them out to either side of her and letting the grass run through her fingers.

It’s a little weird, she realizes, to not hear some sort of insect life making noise in the night. She’d only been on Earth a few months, granted, but even in the middle of the city, there were crickets or flies or— _something_ , making a ruckus just outside. It’s almost eerie to hear nothing but the wind and the rustling of the grass as she walks. 

_But_ , she thinks, smiling a little, _at least there are no mosquitos anywhere to be found. Within thousands of light years, even._

Eventually, she comes to a stop, glancing back over her shoulder to find her house not actually as far behind her as she thought it’d be. The air out here is clean and fresh, and she closes her eyes as another breeze dances on by, combing cool fingers through her hair where it hangs loose about her shoulders.

She’s just fixed her gaze back on the night sky, and the cloud of stars stretching across it, when her girlfriend’s voice breaks the silence.

“Kira?”

Reluctantly, Kira turns away to glance back at where Tali’s walking towards her now, the throw blanket from the sofa wrapped around her shoulders. Her eyes glow brightly in the dark, and Kira smiles through the butterflies in her stomach at the sight. 

“Hey,” she responds as she gets closer. “Did I wake you?”

Tali shakes her head as she slows to a stop beside her. “I reached for you and you weren’t beside me. I was worried.”

Kira frowns. “Worried? About what?”

Tali shrugs, pulling the blanket a little tighter around her shoulders and stepping into Kira’s side to rest her cheek on her shoulder. “I have no idea. I think I might still not be convinced that we actually won the war.”

“Hm. You and me both.”

They fall silent for a moment, both of them now looking up at the sky again. After a few heartbeats, somewhere to the right of where Kira’s trying to make out a pattern in the stars, a shooting star flashes on its way to the ground.

“Did you see that?” Kira breathes, nudging her girlfriend gently.

Tali hums softly. “The meteor?”

“We call them shooting stars. You’re supposed to make a wish on them.”

“…why?”

Kira snorts, shrugging the shoulder Tali isn’t leaning on. “Hell if I know. It’s just a tradition.”

Tali sighs, and when Kira looks down at her curiously, she finds her eyes closed, the ghost of a smile on her full lips—and, for a brief moment, Kira is so in love with the woman beside her that she finds it hard to breathe.

_If there’s anything left in this galaxy to wish for,_ she thinks _, then I hope—I_ wish _—that Tali and I get more nights just like this—carefree and quiet and safe. I think we've earned that much._

When Tali still doesn’t open her eyes after another moment, Kira smiles and says, “If you’re tired, we can go back inside.”

“Shh,” Tali mumbles, grinning wider now. “I’m still making my wish.”

“Must be a hell of a wish.”

She giggles, finally opening her eyes again to smile up at Kira sweetly. “I don’t know about you, but on the Flotilla, we believed that sharing wishes made them less likely to come true.”

Kira nods thoughtfully. “Don’t worry, we have that belief, too.”

Tali stays leaning on Kira for another beat, before she moves away with a quiet, “It _was_ a good one, though.”

“I bet,” Kira says as she watches Tali slip the blanket from her shoulders and lay it out on the ground behind them, kneeling to smooth out the grass beneath the fabric. When she finishes, she lays down on her back, patting the space beside her in invitation—one that Kira accepts with another quiet laugh.

It takes Kira a moment to settle comfortably, but when she does, her girlfriend slips her hand into hers, squeezing gently. As Kira wonders distantly when the feeling of three fingers to five started to feel as natural as breathing, Tali lets out a slow breath and says, “I’ve never seen the stars like this.”

“Me neither,” Kira replies, eyes locked on the unfamiliar constellations, and the strange shape of the Milky Way as it stretches across a sky that doesn’t belong to her. She can’t remember ever having seen the Milky Way, actually—too much time spent on space stations, and too little time spent on the ground. Seeing the galaxy from the window of a starship isn't nearly the same as seeing it from the surface of a planet.

“Not even when you were on Earth?”

Kira laughs, shaking her head. “No, I was stuck in a big city. There was too much light pollution and—and even then, the Milky Way from _my_ homeworld is at an entirely different angle than it is from here.”

“Huh,” says Tali lightly. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

Kira hums. “Sun told me once that that was her favorite part of being in the Alliance—when they landed on new worlds and she got to see the night sky from a new planet’s perspective. Said it was always fascinating, seeing the galaxy like that.” Lifting her free hand to watch its silhouette against the stars, she tilts her head and adds, “I think I get it now.”

“I forget, sometimes, how small we really are compared to the entire galaxy." Tali raises her free hand, too, and Kira almost wants to take a picture of their hands side-by-side, with the entire Milky Way as the backdrop. "The Mass Effect Relays make the galaxy feel so much smaller than it is.”

“100,000 light years across,” Kira murmurs, dropping her hand back to her side. “100,000 light years and somehow we managed to be born at just the right time, in just the right place, to meet each other and fall in love. I mean, what are the odds? How close were we to never meeting each other? To never crossing paths and ending up somewhere else completely—and fate still decided that we should meet. It's...incredible, really, don't you think?”

Tali gives a little huff that makes Kira turn to look at her, only to find her smiling up at the stars, still looking at her hand. “You say the most romantic things, sometimes, I swear…”

“Well, I do love you an awful lot,” she breathes, lifting their intertwined hands to press a kiss to the back of Tali’s hand. “And I’m so glad, of all the possible universes and timelines I could have existed in, I ended up in this one, here with you. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”

Tali looks at her then, all beautiful lavender skin and glowing eyes and freckles like tiny stars across her cheeks, and Kira finds she can’t quite feel her fingers anymore. Smiling, Tali drops her gaze to Kira’s lips, reaches over to touch her cheek, and mumbles, “ _Kiss me_.”

And she does, firmly and sweetly, smiling into her girlfriend’s lips when she giggles delightedly. Just as she’s deepened the kiss, the wind decides to pick up again, ruffling her hair and making Tali giggle even more, shrinking away and rubbing at her face.

“Your hair tickles,” she gasps, even as she laughs and slides her fingers into the hair at the nape of Kira’s neck as Kira buries her face in her girlfriend's shoulder, snickering. 

They stay like that for a long moment, listening to the whispering desert grass and each other’s breath as Tali’s fingers trace circles into the back of Kira’s neck. After a few minutes, Kira’s getting a little too comfortable, starting to drift sleepily, so she pushes herself back up onto her elbows. She hovers, before leaning down to get one more, slow kiss in before she mumbles, “Ready to go back to bed?” into her girlfriend’s lips.

“Only if you are.”

Kira rolls her eyes, chuckling as she pushes herself to her feet, reaching down to pull her girlfriend to her feet, too. Tali stumbles a little, right into Kira’s arms, and Tali closes the distance this time, reaching up to lock her arms around Kira’s neck as she sighs into her mouth. They sway on the spot, pulling away to press their foreheads together, both of them grinning in the starlight. 

“If you want,” Tali says suddenly, after a few heartbeats, pulling back to look back up at the stars, “I can probably find the old book of constellations my father had. We could come out tomorrow night and try to find them all.”

Kira grins, bending to pick the blanket up off the ground and then sliding her free hand into Tali's. 

“It’s a date.”

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this because I wasn't feeling good and it made me feel better. I hope you enjoyed it, too!
> 
> Come visit me on [tumblr](www.galpalaven.tumblr.com)!


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